This book is the outcome of the successful NATO Advanced Study Institute on Pattern Recognition Theory and Applications, held at St. Anne's College, Oxford, in April 1981., The aim of the meeting was to review the recent advances in the theory of pattern recognition and to assess its current and future practical potential. The theme of the Institute - the decision making aspects of pattern recognition with the emphasis on the novel hybrid approaches - and its scope - a high level tutorial coverage of pattern recognition methodologies counterpointed with contrib- uted papers on advanced...

The many different mathematical techniques used to solve pattem recognition problems may be grouped into two general approaches: the decision-theoretic (or discriminant) approach and the syntactic (or structural) approach. In the decision-theoretic approach, aset of characteristic measurements, called features, are extracted from the pattems. Each pattem is represented by a feature vector, and the recognition of each pattem is usually made by partitioning the feature space. Applications of decision-theoretic approach indude character recognition, medical diagnosis, remote sensing, reliability...

This book seeks to elucidate picture engineering as a new discipline for hand ling the entire scope of picture processing in a systematic manner. Picture engineering as a discipline has three aspects, the first of which is methodo logical, technical, and architectural. The second consists of pattern ana lysis and recognition of pictorial input, picture database management, inclu ding picture data structure and data representation for picture storage and transformation, and computer graphics for picture output and display. Ver satile applications such as computer-aided design, manufacturing...